Sunday, April 20, 2008

To date, this season has been a remarkable collection of dominant innings for Yu Darvish, as he has only been scored upon in 1 of 34 innings pitched. His ERA entering the game against SoftBank was a phenomenal 0.53 and hitters just can't touch him at all. Still, SoftBank was the club that gave him some trouble a couple of weeks earlier and a bad first inning would be deadly. Hawks' leadoff man and shortstop Munenori Kawasaki was hit by a pitch to start the game against Darvish the last go around. What would he do in this contest?

So, another shaky start for Darvish. There seems to be some reason to continue worrying about the trend that has become his trademark. Nothing earth-shattering occurred here, but the inability to work clean 1st innings on a regular basis is the Achilles heel for an otherwise unhittable man. In this case, an error cost Darvish an unearned run, but there were two hits scratched across by the Hawks and the hope for a sub-1.00 ERA will depend on getting the lone chink in his armor worked out.

The good news is that Darvish only allowed one more baserunner in working the complete game shutout. The eighth and ninth innings saw our ace retire 5 of the last 6 batters by strikeout and slam the door on the Hawks for good. All told, Darvish threw 103 pitches over 9, allowing three hits and no walks, striking out 10. His ERA now stands at a miniscule 0.42 and he has pitched 42 of 43 innings with no score. Uncanny.

There are 8 more pitchers with ERAs under 2.00 (and Satoshi Komatsu (ORX) exactly at 2.00). That makes for a lot of low scoring games. The fact that so many pitchers this year have such low ERAs leads me to think that it's definitely plausible for one of them to end under 1.00.

But it's still early yet. I remember Iwakuma starting out with something like 10 wins in a row a few years back, then struggling to get his 11th for the rest of the season.